"Tom Purdom - Fossil Games" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

message from the probe had triggered off the debate, he put a two-axis graph
on the screen and examined a pair of curves.

****

Morgan's pairing with Savela Insdotter had lasted over sixty years and
they had remained friendly after they had unpaired. He showed her the graph as
soon as he had run it through some extra checks. The curve that charted the
Eight's activities rose and fell in conjunction with the curve that measured
Madame Dawne's participation in the debate. When Madame Dawne's activity level
reached a peak, the Eight subsided into silence. They would stop agitating for
their cause, the entire discussion would calm down, and Madame Dawne would
return to the extreme privacy she had maintained from the beginning of the
voyage. Then, when Madame Dawne hadn't been heard from for several tendays,
the Eight would suddenly renew their campaign.
"I believe they're supporting the change to a new destination merely
because they wish to disturb Madame Dawne," Morgan said. "I've created
personality profiles based on their known histories and public statements. The
profiles indicate my conjecture is correct."
Savela presented him with a shrug and a delicate, upward movement of her
head. Morgan had spoken to her in Tych-- an ultra-precise language that was
primarily used in written communication. Savela was responding in an
emotion-oriented language called VA13-- a language which made extensive use of
carefully rehearsed gestures and facial expressions.
No one, as far as Morgan knew, had ever spoken VA12 or VA14. The language
had been labeled VA13 when it had been developed in a communications
laboratory on Phobos, and the label had stuck.
"Madame Dawne is a laughable figure," Savela said.
"I recognize that. But the Eight are creating a serious division in our
communal life. We might have reached a consensus by now if they hadn't
restimulated the debate_ every time it seemed to be concluding. Madame Dawne
is one of the eleven wealthiest individuals on the ship. What would happen to
us if she decided she had to impose her will by force?"
"Do you really feel that's a serious possibility, Morgan?"
The linguists who had developed VA13 had been interested in the emotional
content of music. The speaker's tone patterns and rhythms were just as
critical as the verbal text. Savela's word choices were polite and innocuous,
but her rhythms communicated something else-- a mixture of affection and
amusement that would have seemed contemptuous if she and Morgan hadn't shared
a pairing that had lasted six decades.

****

To Morgan, Madame Dawne was pathetic, not comic. She spent most of her
days, as far as anyone could tell, in the electronic dream worlds she
constructed in her apartment. No one on the ship had seen her true face. When
she appeared on someone's screens, her electronic personae were impressively
unimaginative. She usually imaged herself as a tall woman, with close cropped
red hair, dressed in the flamboyant boots-and-baggy-shirts style that North
Americans had adapted during the third decade of the 21st Century-- the body